So with all the fuss being made on the internet about cuil.com (pronounced cool.com) I decided to check it out.
My review can be written in a few words “Not worth it”.
That’s right, cuil is so not cool. Searches show irrelevant results, pictures that don’t match the domain, results that don’t make sense, and a lack of results that should be there.
Now one would think with former Google engineers that cuil would be a lot better than it is, but it’s not.
For example a search in cuil for “A-V Tronics” (my main website) returned the following results
- Cuil: 0
- Google: about 44,700
- MSN: 28,900 results
- Yahoo: about 198,000
Now I sure don’t run a Fortune 500 company, but my name is out there on a LOT of pages. Lets try a search for “DMOZ slice”. This is an interesting search because on most search engines I am listed as #1 including on Google
- Cuil: 3,633,013 results for dmoz slice
- Google: about 47,800
- MSN: 24,300 results
- Yahoo: about 128,000
Wow, that’s a lot of results on Cuil. But try and find my sites which are #1 on so many other search engines and they’re buried deep.
A search for “IndexU” on Google, MSN and Yahoo all list nicecoder.com, on Cuil neither nicecoder.com NOR indexu.com are listed in the first few pages. That doesn’t exactly make much sense does it?
A search for “Internet secure” on Cuil returns the internet secure logo on a competitors description and URL. This brings up another point, how long is it going to take companies to sue Cuil for the misuse of their logo’s. I think it will take about as long as it takes to dial the lawyers phone number.
A search for “Forbes” returns the correct website, with a picture of a couple holding their baby! A search for one of my local news papers returned 0 results, the other local paper had over 1.1 million results.
Until they get their algorhythm down they’re a waste of time. I would give them a month or so to deal with their results and give them another try. Of course no one is perfect, but the results they’re giving are just strange.
